You're getting really into the weeds on a broader point. Suppose we give a new driver their license - but they've never driven before. Technically they have a perfect driving record. Even 1 or 2 hours in on road, still a perfect driving record.
Most student drivers in fact will have in fact, completely perfect driving records. That accidents happen is irrelevant - just think - those stats for the first couple of months probably look spectacular compared to the normal population.
The original comparison is all about this use of a biased dataset to draw an invalid conclusion. Except with student drivers we know that actually we shouldn't trust that conclusion, because in practice they have an insufficient amount of experience and have not likely dealt with many challenging road situations.
> That accidents happen is irrelevant - just think - those stats for the first couple of months probably look spectacular compared to the normal population.
This is exactly the point I'm disagreeing on. I have no reason to think that student drivers do better (in, say, number of crashes per thousand hours driven) than other drivers. In fact they probably do worse. The person I replied to suggested that student drivers all have perfect records, and I'm genuinely perplexed about how that could possibly be the case... my question is genuine - I simply don't understand what they meant.
> student drivers have the best driving record out there. No fines, no accidents.
> I'm genuinely perplexed about how that could possibly be the case
I live in Europe where student drivers must be accompanied at all times while driving by a professional instructor with secondary controls at their disposal. There's no "just have an adult with a driver license dozing off in the passenger seat and you're good to go".
The instructor holds a lot of responsibility, they are responsible for everything that happens in/with the car, so they make sure to be very conservative with that brake pedal and instructions. "No accidents" may have been a small exaggeration, surely a couple of them will eventually have one. But statistically students are by far safer than regular drivers because their mistakes rarely if ever turn into an incident. The special conditions (constant supervision, lower speeds, controlled route, etc.) make sure of this.
But this just makes my point in a way my comment above couldn't: when you're lacking data even reality can be genuinely perplexing.
Tesla's statistics are misleading because this serves them. Comparing the number of accidents between a fleet of modern cars to one where the average age is 12 years, excluding city driving because nobody does that anyway, and not counting every driver made adjustment as a failure of the AP is specifically meant to give the wrong impression.
Any car can drive itself on the highway if you just tweak the steering wheel one in a while to keep it on the road. That's what, 0.1s every 10s? But saying it drives itself 99% of the time is misleading at best.
I'm sure driver assists help reduce accidents and they're the way to the future. But Tesla's "conclusion" that AP is safer than a human driver based on their misleading statistics is a flat out marketing lie.
> I live in Europe where student drivers must be accompanied at all times while driving by a professional instructor with secondary controls at their disposal.
I don't know if you're familiar with Asterix comics, but this is one of those "All of Gaul?" type situations. Belgium allows parents to teach children on a probationary license. Nowadays, the requirement is the parent has held a license for 8 years and hasn't been in an accident in I believe the last 3. The student driver also isn't allowed to drive between 10pm and 6am during weekends and the nights preceding and following official holidays.
It also allows people to drive fully autonomously up to 18 months with a probationary license before they take their official test - which they fail once on average. During Covid, those 18 months might have become 24 or more, because test centres were closed.
Mea culpa, I wasn't aware of countries in Europe where this is allowed and I generalized because I'd rather not share specifics. Is this a years or decades old thing?
Maybe it was just my bias making me assume it's the kind of field where you'd want professional training in a car with dual controls, not a regular car with an instructor who might have never driven after getting their license 8 years ago, or one that has an abysmal driving record but took a break for 3 years and it's "clean". And even a great driver would have difficulties avoiding an accident when the controls are on the other side of the car.
